Assessment of Visual Comfort in the UII Library

Abstract

Libraries are common communal areas for students, especially in higher education. Not only to read, the space tends to also be used as a place of co-working. Unfortunately, the unoptimized infrastructure of libraries became one of the factors of the country’s low literacy rate. To encourage people to visit libraries in order to also increase the country’s literacy rate, we need to make sure to accommodate the needs of the visitors, which is the visual comfort. This research assesses the existing condition of the main library of Universitas Islam Indonesia to see whether or not the building had fulfilled all the criterias of visual comfort. The research was conducted with a quantitative method with direct data collection by light intensity measurement and user’s perception’s questionnaires as well as doing simulation to modify the existing performance with DIALux software. The result showed that most of the lighting performance was up to standard only during the day, which implies the lack of sufficiency of the artificial lighting intensity performance.